The Mamdani Era Begins His opponents tried to smear him for his youth, inexperience, and leftist politics. But New Yorkers didn’t want a hardened political insider to be mayor—they wanted Zohran Mamdani.

Eric Lach

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It’s ancient history now, but when Zohran Mamdani first entertained the notion of running for mayor, he imagined himself running against Eric Adams. It was 2021, and Adams had just won a squeaker of a primary, convincing New Yorkers that what they needed in the post-COVID moment was a swaggering ex-cop who believed in good old-fashioned law and order. This summer, while I was reporting a Profile of Mamdani, Kenny Burgos, an old classmate of his from high school and a colleague in the New York State Assembly, recalled Mamdani being despondent at Adams’s victory. “He was, like, ‘Who are we going to get to run against this guy in four years?’ ” Burgos told me. “I said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ He said, ‘I’m too young, they won’t take me seriously.’ ”

Four years later, every apprehension that Mamdani and other leftists and liberals had toward an Adams mayoralty has proved justified. The Adams administration unravelled in a spray of cartoonish corruption charges that brought to mind the old grafts of Tammany Hall; the Mayor saved himself from prosecution by cutting a deal with a newly reëlected President Donald Trump. Now, as masked federal agents snatch weeping fathers and mothers from immigration court, just a few blocks from City Hall, Adams, having dropped his campaign for reëlection, is enjoying his lame-duck period. He just went on a sightseeing trip to Albania.

Where others saw a city with no one at the wheel, Andrew Cuomo, the scowling former governor who resigned in 2021 amid sexual-harassment and abuse-of-power allegations, saw opportunity. Earlier this year, Cuomo emerged from his sister’s lavish estate in Westchester, kicked his daughter out of her apartment in midtown, and entered the mayoral race intending to win City Hall in an act of pure power politics, to remind us of his ability to bend both friends and enemies to his will. Yet his plodding and depressing campaign pleased almost no one. Cuomo barely veiled his contempt for most New Yorkers and for the grubby office of the mayor. His trash talk of Mamdani became openly Islamophobic. The day before Election Day, he bizarrely drove around the city in a white Ford Bronco, which he later clarified was similar to but not the same model as the one O. J. Simpson made famous.